CONRAD DIARIES EXHIBITED IN WIDENER TREASURE ROOM

Admirers of Joseph Conrad will be interested to note that two of his diaries containing a description of a journey in Congo have been put on exhibition in the Treasure Room of Widener Library this week. The diaries contain not only accounts of the journey, but also maps, profile sections, and travelling directions. An early and much interlined draft of "Lord Jim" is also being exhibited. This draft is scribbled in a commonplace blank book which contains a few extracts in Polish, possibly in his mother's hand.

In the same case may be seen Samuel Taylor Coleridge's copy of 'Barclaii Argenis", with notes in the owner's hand. This volume is the gift of Mrs. Norton Perkins in memory of Norton Perkins '98. Apparently the author of "The Ancient Mariner" shared in some degree the modern schoolboy's dislike for the Latin language, for we find inscribed on the fly leaf: "Heaven forbid! This work should not exist in its present form and language! Yet I cannot avoid the wish that it had been, during the reign of James the first, moulded into an heroic poem in English Octava Rima."